Definition
An archaic Law French form of DEFENDANT. In old practice, the party against whom a civil or criminal action was instituted. The term carried the same functional meaning as its modern successor: the defending party in litigation. In early criminal proceedings by appeal — the private accusatory procedure that predated the public prosecution model — the accused was designated both *defendaunt* and *defendour*.
Common Language
Wiktionary: Obsolete form of defendant.
This term has no independent life in modern common usage. It appears only in historical legal texts and is not a variant spelling in current practice. Researchers encountering it in manuscript or printed sources should treat it as straightforwardly equivalent to *defendant* and proceed accordingly.
Common Confusion
DEFENDAUNT vs. DEFENDOUR: Burrill notes that both terms were applied to the accused in the old criminal appeal proceeding. They are not meaningfully distinct — *defendour* is a parallel Law French form, and the two appear interchangeably in early sources. Neither carries a separate technical meaning distinguishable from the other.
Why It Matters in Research
This term will surface in Law Mind corpus materials drawn from medieval and early modern English legal texts, particularly those reproducing or glossing Britton, Bracton, and related treatises. Its presence signals Law French source material, which affects how surrounding terminology should be interpreted — other terms in the same passage may be Law French forms that do not map cleanly onto their modern English equivalents.
The shift from *defendaunt* to *defendant* is not merely orthographic. It reflects the transition from Law French as the operative language of English legal pleading to English, a process substantially complete by the late seventeenth century. Sources using *defendaunt* are almost certainly pre-Restoration, and their procedural context — especially if the criminal appeal is involved — differs fundamentally from modern adversarial criminal procedure.
Researchers should also note that the criminal "appeal" referenced in Burrill is the *appeal of felony*, a private accusatory action that permitted a victim or kin to prosecute a defendant directly, distinct from the crown prosecution that eventually displaced it. The term *defendaunt* in that context therefore describes an accused in a proceeding with no direct modern counterpart.
Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill is the primary shelf source here, and his entry is brief but precise. He correctly identifies the term as Law French, places it in old practice, gives the functional definition (defending party; party against whom an action is instituted), and distinguishes the criminal appeal context where both *defendaunt* and *defendour* were used. His illustrative quotation from Britton — the thirteenth-century legal treatise attributed to John le Breton — is genuinely instructive as a period source, showing the term in situ. No significant points of divergence among historical sources arise with a term of this straightforwardness. The main limitation of Burrill's treatment is that it does not trace the procedural mechanics of the criminal appeal in any depth, which a researcher needing that context will have to pursue through supplementary sources on medieval English procedure.